“It was probably inevitable,” says commentator Richard John Neuhaus.* On May 28, in a ceremony in the Netherlands, Jennifer Hoes apparently pledged to love, honor, and cherish—Jennifer Hoes. That’s right. She married herself. (A friend of mine thinks that this one is headed for a really nasty divorce.)


“It is logical that one promises to be faithful to oneself,” Hoes explains. Of course it’s “logical.” Who is it that almost everyone finds it easiest to “love, honor, and cherish”? When you look at it that way, for someone to marry herself makes perfect sense.


Let’s go a step further. Hoes’s position is simply one current view of marriage taken to an extreme. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to narrow, traditional ideas about what “marriage” is, this argument goes. Marriage can be whatever we’d like it to be—a man and a woman, a man and several women, two men, two women, and now a woman and herself. Once a society rejects God’s definition of “marriage” as “the lifelong union of one man and one woman,” on what basis can it fault Hoes’s arrangement?


Moreover, Hoes is just an unusually clear example of something we see all around us. Every day thousands of people marry the person they are counting on to meet their every need and make them happy. A marriage like this is just as much about “me” as Hoes’s is. Inevitably these people discover that no human being is going to meet all their needs or guarantee their happiness. So they conclude that something must be wrong with marriage or at least with theirs.


There’s nothing wrong with marriage as God designed it. There’s everything wrong with latching onto a spouse like a parasite and demanding to have my needs met, while I go along for the ride. The problem, in other words, isn’t marriage. It’s selfishness. The solution lies in the selfless one who “did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28).


For followers of Jesus, Hoes has it exactly backwards. The way to a happy marriage isn’t to make yourself your spouse. The way is to make your spouse your “self”—in other words, to give your spouse the kind of love that by nature we reserve for the person in the mirror. “He who loves his wife loves himself” (Ephesians 5:28), says Paul, in one of the most beautiful sections on marriage in Scripture—a section that spells out what to “become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24) really means.